Case Studies of Desktop Grid Particularly from the Asia-Pacific Region: Malaysia & Indonesia

This afternoon I gave my presentation regarding Desktop Grid activities in Asia-Pacific region with focus on Malaysia and Indonesia. The Desktop Grid implementation in this region may already exist but uncoordinated. The effort to introduce and coordinate the Desktop Grid was started since last year just after ISGC 2011 end. There was Dr. Robert Lovas from Desktop Grid for International Scientific Collaboration (DEGISCO) project who introduce the technology and the initiative to unite the Desktop Grid/Volunteer computing under International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) umbrella. Two training and seminar events was held in Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). The outcome from these events are promising: UPM has just completed their phase one Desktop Grid implementation based on SZDG-BOINC (called DG@Putra), Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) and ITB about to complete their Desktop Grid implementation that UTP particularly will use SZDG-BOINC as their campus grid platform. The next step would be integrating the Desktop Grid to existing National/Regional Distributed Computing Infrastructure (Malaysia especially) and will continuously provide support (e.g. training, awareness seminar, consultation) to Desktop Grid communities in South-East Asia region particularly.

Quake-Catcher Network (QCN)

In parallel with iRODS workshop, there was another Asia@Home session. The session talked about the Quake-Catcher Network (QCN). The QCN provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The QCN links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network. To detect seismic activities, the QCN use vibrational sensosrs called MEMS accelerometers. The QCN use volunteer distributed computing network platform (i.e. BOINC) to do the real-time computation with data from the sensor. The QCN software was developed by Stanford University and to start volunteer simply plug the seismic sensor install on their computer via USB interface, install BOINC client and attach the QCN project. The session's participants  was given opportunity to try the  sensor and the application at first hand as shown in the figure above :)

Tackling Volunteer Computing's Social Side

With the Launch of Progress Thru Processors, users can join Volunteer Computing projects from inside Facebook -- the app makes it point-and-click simple for Facebook users to lend idle processing power to scientific and medical research.

The goal of project is to broaden public participation in Volunteer Computing, and all indications are that the venture is off to a good start, having attracted more than 125,000 fans since the August launch.

Progress Thru Processors is a collaboration between Intel, GridRepublic, and BOINC.

Volunteer Computing to Volunteer Scientific Development

Ben Segal presented today their talk "Building a Volunteer Cloud" in the CLCAR 2009. Prof. Segal discuss about the opportunities of Volunteer computing to build realistic possibilities of High Performance Computing, addressing Cloud Computing. Using BOINC and Virtualization in a Cloud context is possible to investigate the use of either emulation or virtualization for BOINC, driven by the porting considerations just described. We quickly showed that emulation was too slow but that virtualization entailed only a few percent of CPU overhead and looked very promising, given the scale of the potential volunteer base.

On the other hand, Segal's talk presents BOINC and virtualization technology as a great opportunity to regional and multidisciplinary projects in LatinAmerica showing good examples of developments in Asia, Africa and Europe. Prof. Segal was made an extended call for motivation and participation in BOINC projects.